I am on a business trip. It is the first one in a while. There is another one to come next week.

Once upon a time I loved business trips. I loved all that came with a business trip – filling out the form for a manager to sign, the manager reading through the estimates (hotel, airfare, food allowance, employee gallivanting about, mobile phone bills to indicative home numbers remonstrating how much you weren’t ready to be away) Planning what business clothes to bring with you. Finding that battered – looking passport. Getting a hold of some local currency. Feeling glee at knowing that you were going to a new place, a new country you’d never been to, one to collect and put a tick mark next to. Turning on the Out Of Office Reply – “Hi, this is Shannon’s Out of Office Reply. I’m very busy and important and in Singapore/Sweden/Australia/USA/pick a country you wish you were in but currently are not/ and thus your emails will be at the bottom of the pile when I return because I am jet lagged, but mostly because clearly you weren’t important enough to be here, too! TTFN!”

And now it’s no longer like that. The Out of Office reply is deigned a necessity to tell people that you like ‘em, but there’s no way you can get to their email because at the end of a full day you crawl into a hotel bed, hopeless and alone and missing the creature comforts of home. You have packed what you need and it’s the bare basics, including pajamas, a bottle of wine, and a handful of hastily packed melatonin. The jet lag is going to kick your already overtired ass. You host a massive business meeting to the board of directors and have packed your very best suits, but the truth is you’d rather be at home in your boxer shorts reading the same goddamn story book to your children for the fiftieth time. Your manager readily gives you permission to travel, but honestly you no longer have to wheedle, in actuality he’s been telling you that you need to go to X location for some time now.

In the airport you wonder how people see you. Once upon a time you had a million platinum cards and every lounge access from here to Asia. Today, the best access you know of is to the most recent event at your kids’ nursery. You are dressed in simple clothes – a top you bought in France for five Euros. Inexpensive jeans. Shoes you bought four years ago. The jewellery you wear is what you usually wear and is a banner of your sentimentality. You wonder if people think you are a student (nope, too old) a housewife (nope, you’re travelling) a businesswoman (nope, too casual). You wonder if you look expensive in the way that someone thinks you are out of their league but to which you can say “Ha ha! I grew up in the military and poor as a church mouse! Ask me how much my shirt cost. Go on, ask me!” You have a Crumpler bag you bought on ebay, filled with designer accessories, none of which you bought. You know to take off your belt and shoes and remove your laptop, when to flirt with immigration and when to toe the line.

You see yourself in a passing two – way security glass. You wonder how you see you. You wonder how others see you – a flirt, a beauty, a wash-up, a has-been, an invisible everyday stranger. Then you realize that it doesn’t matter. Not really.

You meet a few colleagues in the waiting area for your flight. You joke. You gossip. You deliberately do not sit together. Sitting together means talking and you’ve moved on. You don’t want to sit with them and they don’t want to sit with you. Life has been tumultuous enough, there’s no need to punctuate small talk with it. No one wants to know how each other’s latest projects are going. We have lives that need living.

Your flight is late. Once upon a time it meant more champagne in a lounge as you were condescending towards the rest of the travellers who were lounge-free, you would synch your Outlook to view mails you felt needed your response, as the company needed you to survive. Now you buy a bottle of water and smile at a Middle Eastern family with quadruplets and get a glass of wine at the bar, a bar that no one offers to buy you a drink at. A delay means less sleep before the big meeting, and you need your sleep. You are not young anymore as evidenced by the lines in your face, your need for sleep, your menstrual cycles changing and fucking with you, your back aching in the morning, your laughter lines becoming lines signifying more passage of time than laughter. You reply to emails on your synched Outlook on the plane as you need to make sure you don’t miss anything – now you need the company instead of the egotistical other way around. You listen to your iPod. When a random recording of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” you put on the iPod to cater to your children comes on by accident you feel like you’ve been punched in the solar plexus. One stanza resonates with you.

“When the traveller in the dark/thanks you for your tiny spark/he could not see which way to go/if you did not twinkle so.”

It is your children’s favorite song and you sing it a dozen times a day, complete with flickering your hands with your son to show the twinkling stars. You want to buy them something immediately. You feel like you cannot breathe because you have prioritized a fucking meeting with the board above time with them, time with the family, time with their lives and all that they know.

On the plane you know the seats to choose and the way to handle the overhead compartments. You have been flirted with twice since going from the airport to here. It’s been pleasant but unremarkable. The man next to you is reading documentation about the company you work for. You could talk to him and about the company. Instead you turn on the laptop and turn up the iPod. The cabin crew give announcements in a language which you do not know and after thirty-five years and four languages you are unlikely to learn. You wish you were home. You do not want a taxi and a hotel bed that has hosted many people before you and a hotel breakfast and hotel sample-sized accessories wrapped in a travel-sized life.

And then on the plane you see a family of four. They are foreign to you and local to where you are going. The cabin crew brings the tired mum a bottle of champagne and a celebration card, saying Happy Birthday. She is in tears, and two rows back her husband raises his glass of bubbly to her, in happiness, and from the other aisle you can see it in his eyes. You, strangely, are in tears, and you have been comfortably numb for some time. And you realize it may be your Business Trip Hell but it’s someone else’s Lovely Day. And then you get over yourself and love life again.

You have work to do. You turn up your music and play Twinkle Twinkle again. The rest of your life is ahead of you, and you have an idea of how to live it. Your family will guide you home because the beacon that they twinkle is so fucking bright it blinds you.

“When the traveller in the dark/thanks you for your tiny spark/he could not see which way to go/if you did not twinkle so.”

-S.